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Learn Node.js: The Complete Course for Beginners

UDP

Explore the fundamentals of UDP in Node.js by working with the dgram module to create server and client sockets. Understand UDP's connectionless protocol and its advantages for real-time data transfer. Learn to send and receive messages using event-driven methods and compare UDP with TCP in practical scenarios.

We'll cover the following...

UDP

Alongside TCP, UDPUser Datagram Protocol is the other most common communication protocol. It provides a simple and lightweight connectionless communication model. Being connectionless, a very minimal amount of protocol mechanisms come into play when sending packets. While checksums are still used for data integrity, UDP is favored in real-time applications, as it avoids the overhead of setting up a connection, error-checking, and retransmission delays.

The dgram module

The dgram module provides an implementation of UDP Datagram sockets. These sockets are required for UDP communication.

const dgram = require("dgram");

const server = dgram.createSocket("udp4");
const port = 3500;

server.on("message", (data, rinfo) => {
  console.log(`Msg from client at port: ${rinfo.port}: ${data}`);
  server.send("Hello from server", rinfo.port, "localhost");
});

server.on("listening", function () {
  console.log("Server is listening on port", port);
});

server.on("close", function (err) {
  if (err) {
    console.log("Client disconnected due to error");
  } else {
    console.log("Client disconnected");
  }
  server.close();
});

server.bind(port);
Use ctrl + b, followed by a direction key, to switch panes in the terminal

The server-side

  • We import the dgram module on line 1.
  • The createSocket method on line 3 creates a UDP socket. A type must be passed; we are using udp4 in our case. The socket returned is an object of the EventEmitter class. This allows us to use the on method to handle
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